Fruit has been the first thing painters practice on for about four hundred years, and it is not because apples are interesting. It is because an apple is a sphere, a pear is two spheres, a jug is a cylinder, and a bowl of grapes is a hundred small spheres sitting in each other's shadows. Learn to make one of those look solid and you have learned most of what a still life asks for.
A numbered kit does the drawing and the color mixing for you, which means you get to spend your attention on the part that actually makes a still life work: light.
What the numbers are really telling you
On a still life, the numbered sections are not arbitrary color regions. They are a map of how light falls across a curved object. On a single apple you will usually find four or five distinct shapes running around it: a bright spot where the light hits directly, a broad mid-tone, a darker band where the surface turns away, a thin strip of lighter color along the far edge, and a shadow underneath.
That thin lighter strip along the shaded edge is the one people are tempted to skip because it looks wrong on its own. It is light bouncing off the table back onto the fruit, and it is the single element that stops an apple looking like a flat red circle. Paint it exactly where the kit puts it.
Painting something round so it looks round
Three habits do most of the work.
Follow the form with the brush. Let the brush strokes curve around the fruit rather than running straight across it. Nobody will consciously notice, but the eye reads the direction of a stroke as the direction of a surface.
Soften the boundary between the mid-tone and the shadow. On a curved object the change from lit to unlit is gradual, and a hard printed line between two numbered sections will read as a crease. While both are still wet, run a barely damp brush along the seam a few times. Our guide to blending on a paint by numbers canvas covers how far to take this before it turns muddy.
Leave the highlight alone. The small bright shape is the thing that says the fruit has a skin. Do not blend it in, and do not enlarge it.
The shadow is not gray
If your kit gives you a warm brown or a violet for the shadow under the fruit, use it as printed and resist the urge to darken it. Shadows on a table pick up color from everything around them — the wood beneath, the fruit above, the light coming through a window. A gray shadow flattens a still life faster than anything else on the canvas.
Look at where the shadow meets the fruit as well. It is darkest and sharpest right where the two touch, and it softens and lightens as it travels away. Most kits print that as two or three separate shapes, and painting them at their proper strengths is what glues the fruit to the table.
Glass, jugs and liquid
Still life sets often include a glass or a pitcher, and this is where people talk themselves out of trusting the kit. A glass of wine or a glass jar is not really an object with a color. It is a set of light and dark shapes stacked in a particular order, plus one or two hard white flecks.
The instruction is simple: paint the shapes as printed, do not invent extra reflections, and do not soften the edges. Reflections in glass have crisp boundaries, unlike the soft turns on fruit. If you blend a glass the way you blend an apple, it stops looking like glass.
What order to work in
Background first, then the large forms, then the small detail. Working outside in means your hand is never resting on a wet area you have just finished.
Within that, a lot of painters do the darks before the lights. Pale colors in these kits are thin by nature, and if a dark overruns its section slightly, a light color will usually cover it. The reverse is much harder. It is not a rule, but on a busy fruit painting with a lot of small adjacent shapes it saves a fair amount of tidying.
If you want to understand why particular colors are sitting next to each other in the first place, our guide to the color wheel explains the relationships the artist was working with.
What we actually have
We should be straight rather than pad a list. Our catalog has one true fruit still life and a small group of related ones.
Apple Harvest is the fruit painting: baskets of red and yellow apples on a garden table. It is a good first still life because the apples are large enough that each one carries a full set of tonal shapes rather than being reduced to two, and the warm and cool reds sit next to each other in a way that teaches you something.
October is autumn flowers gathered in ceramic pitchers, and it is a still life in the traditional sense — objects on a surface under a single light. The pottery gives you the cylinder practice that fruit gives you the sphere practice for.
Cosmos From the Garden is pink cosmos in a green glass jar by a window, and it is the one to pick if you want the glass problem described above. Ritas Pansies and Sweet Petunias are potted-flower still lifes against stone, both a little more forgiving.
What we do not have is a grapes-and-wine painting, a citrus study, or a classical Dutch table piece, and it would be no use to you if we implied otherwise. You can see everything we do make in the full collection.
If you want a specific one
Still life is the one subject where people often have a very particular picture in mind — the bowl on their own kitchen table, a jug that belonged to somebody. A custom kit made from your own photograph will turn that into a numbered canvas. Photograph it near a window with the light coming from one side rather than head on, because side light is what produces the shapes described at the top of this page. A flat, evenly lit photo makes a flat, evenly lit painting.
Where it goes on the wall
Fruit and still life belong in kitchens and dining rooms for the obvious reason, and they hold up well there because the subject is at rest. A landscape asks you to look into the distance. A bowl of apples asks nothing at all, which is exactly what you want on the wall you sit opposite every evening.
